Saddam's pleasure cruiser torched

April 11 2003

The once resplendent Al-Mansur looking worse for wear

Saddam Hussein's once gleaming multi-million-dollar pleasure cruiser was a blackened, listing, bomb-damaged hulk adrift in the Shatt Al Arab waterway yesterday, a worthy metaphor for his grip on power in Iraq.

Leaning heavily to port, the 66-metre Al Mansur was at the whim of the tide, bobbing around the main dock of Basra surrounded by an ugly puddle of diesel oil, its Iraqi flag hanging limp and torn at its sternpost.

Its teak helipad, once polished and gleaming, was covered in twisted shards of steel ripped from the superstructure of the German made-vessel and the few intact gangways and deck ladders were covered in a thick layer of oily soot.

"It was so beautiful when it came up the Shatt Al Arab, it looked like a big, white bird," Ta'ad Al Taher, a local dockworker, said.

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Locals said it had been hit by 16 Allied bombs over the last two weeks. There were pockmarks from shrapnel from bow to stern and the main living area was just one enormous cavity of burnt wood, twisted metal and torn cables.

To confirm it really was Saddam's boat it was necessary to board the vessel, a hazardous operation involving hiring a local fisherman and clambering up a skew whiff gangplank hanging by a dangerously thin hawser on the non-burnt side.

Two orange lifeboats hung down, held just at one end, looking like oversized baubles on a Christmas tree.

Once onboard, only a few of its once glamorous fittings had escaped the flames including an operating theatre kitted out with a centrifuge and anaesthetic machine on a lower deck, a table tennis table and an enormous wooden eagle, the Iraqi symbol of state.

Asbestos fibres were strewn everywhere but some of the original manufacturers' labels - Schat-Davit, Hamburg - were visible on control panels and door handles.

Locals said it had had a crew of 120 special members of the Republican Guard but there was no sign of them on board.

Moved from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr shortly before the war began on March 20, Saddam's supporters had hoped the Al Mansur - the Arabic for "the victor" - would be safe from Allied forces.

It was attacked repeatedly, however, both from the air and with Allied naval artillery from Royal Navy ships out in the Gulf.

Given to Saddam by the Saudi royal family back in the 1980s as a gesture of thanks for keeping the fundamentalist threat at bay by fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran in the first Gulf War, the boat was reported to be kept stocked with the finest food and drink in case Saddam decided to use it.

It was a shadow of this glamorous former self in the Shatt Al Arab yesterday. Crowds of looters waited for it to beach firmly on a sand bank so that the serious business of stripping it bare could begin.

Nearby in a warehouse in Basra dockyard, five unused Iraqi missiles could be found. The 6.6-metre-long missiles bore English markings, including the serial number HY-26 and appeared to be anti-ship missiles.

But they also bore computer bar codes deposited by UN weapons inspectors and they had remained unused during the war.